The invention concerns a method and device for remotely measuring the volume of liquid stored in external floating roof tanks and/or the corresponding fill rate in an automatic way.
Most of crude oil and petroleum products are stored in external tanks between production and consumption.
The global and local levels of storage are key indicators of the petroleum markets as they strongly reflect the demand/supply balance.
However, most regions in the world do not publish official storage figures or do so infrequently and with some lag.
There is therefore a great value in having near real-time independent measurements of storage tanks all over the world.
Existing techniques to remotely measure the volume of liquid stored in external floating roof tanks rely on photographic or infrared images taken by aerial devices [Alphenaar 2014, Babenko 2017]. These techniques are not applicable in the presence of clouds or at night.
Some authors [Galasso 2010, Guida 2010] proposed an algorithm to estimate the parameters (diameter, top height, roof height) of a floating roof tank in radar images by using a radiometric method based on a radar scattering model. In their algorithm, the tanks parameters are derived from the signal intensity of some particular points in the radar image.
The detection of these particular points in the radar image is a prerequisite which is not addressed by their algorithm.